Date: Sat, 04 Apr 1998 15:15:13 -0500
From: Kevin Johnson <kjohnson@truesoft.com>
To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com
Subject: Re: Original GThomas

Paul Miller wrote:

> I have found time to look at Patterson's catchword argument 
> and I do find it persuasive. 

Thanks for taking the time, making an effort, and having a look.  And just
to give those who have not seen his book "The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus"
an idea of what it contains, Patterson writes:

"Now, since for most of this text we are dependent today upon a late Coptic
translation, it is prima facie likely that many such catchwords will have
been washed away over the course of its transmission history and lost,
especially in the course of translating from Greek to Coptic. Nonetheless,
the pervasiveness of catchword associations within Thomas is underscored by
the very large number of them that have survived even the translation into
Coptic. When one adds to this list certain instances in which a Greek
catchword may still be detected behind two different words or phrases in
the present Coptic text, the list of catchwords in Thomas becomes quite
extensive indeed."

Patterson then proceeds to list some 64 examples of Coptic/Greek catchword
connections between sayings.

> The only problem I found with it is saying 114 is
> considered a later addition by some and I concur with this, but logion
> 114 is joined to 113 by the catchword EICQHHTE (look). 

Here you have a choice. You can either say, "The evidence does not support
the theory and so there must be something wrong with the theory," or you
can say,

> If scribal
> layering was done with knowledge of the catchwords then Patterson's
> catchword argument doesn't speak to the stratification question.

..."There must be something wrong with the evidence." Sigh.

I'm trying not to shout here, but I would just like to underscore one
point: Catchword association is a sign of oral tradition, not written
redaction! The doublets in GTh, most of which occur after saying #100, are
sometimes taken as evidence of a written literary history of the text of
Gth, that is, as a sign of *written* redaction. But catchword associations
have long been known by Biblical scholars to be a sign of *oral* tradition.
The idea that catchword association could somehow be a part of scribal
redaction is a heresy that was introduced only recently by Mike ("Marcion")
Grondin!

But there is something here that seems to go beyond even talking about
written vs. oral transmission issues. Which is the idea the author/redactor
of GTh was someone who was overly clever - someone who might hide secrets
or secret interpretations within the text. I do not share this view. The
text itself is rough, redundant, and not the work of an accomplished author
(or redactor, for that matter). 

Furthermore, some sayings may strike us as strange because the saying has
been distorted during the course of transmission or because (and this goes
back to a point Steve raised during the recent reincarnation of the
Davies/Arnal debate) we lack the setting for the saying. To give an
example, Bill Arnal lists saying #15 among those which are in his Stratum 2
of GThomas:

15)  Jesus said, "When you see one who was not born of woman,
prostrate yourselves on your faces and worship him. That one is
your Father."

Certainly this saying seems a bit odd. But what if we knew that the
occasion of the saying was when some people bowed down before Jesus (a
scene which does occur in the synoptics)? Would the saying then seem more
meaningful to us? I think so. Which is not to say that this was the setting
for #15, just that the fact that we usually lack the setting in GTh
accounts for much of the "strangeness" of some sayings. 

I have become convinced that GTh often functions as a projective test does
in psychology (such as the Rorschach inkblot test); that is, it functions
as a relatively neutral stimulus onto which people project their own issues.  

- Kevin
(kjohnson@truesoft.com)